How do Children Make use of Language in Learning the Semantic Structure of the World?

• In Event: The Role of Language in Concept Acquisition in Typical and Atypical Populations

Abstract

As adults, we draw upon our ample knowledge about the world to support such vital cognitive feats as communicating using language, reasoning, and retrieving knowledge relevant to our current goals. Our knowledge readily supports these feats because it is not just a collection of stored information. Instead, knowledge functions as an organized network of concepts, typically denoted by words, that are systematically connected by meaningful, “semantic” links. For example, our knowledge of the concept “apple” is not isolated, but can instead be linked to knowledge of other members of the same taxonomic category (e.g., fruits), or other associated concepts, such as “eat” and “juicy”. How do the links that fundamentally organize semantic knowledge emerge with development?

Language is in principle a rich source of input for fostering semantic organization. According to extensive computational modeling research and analyses of language, the semantic links that organize adult knowledge are latent in the regularities with which words for concepts co-occur. Specifically, words for concepts that are associatively linked reliably directly co-occur with each other (e.g., “apple” directly co-occurs with “eat” and “juicy”), and words for concepts belonging to the same taxonomic category share direct co-occurrence with other words (e.g., “apple” and “grapes” share co-occurrence with “eat” and “juicy”). However, the presence of these regularities in language does not tell us whether exposure to these regularities contributes to the development of organized semantic knowledge in humans.

Across two series of studies with four-year-old children and adults, we investigated the role of direct and shared co-occurrence regularities in language in the development of semantic organization. Using a variety of behavioral paradigms, the first set of studies provides convergent evidence that associative links between concepts whose labels reliably directly co-occur in language emerge in young children. With age, these links are increasingly supplemented by taxonomic links between concepts whose labels likely share co-occurrence. The second set of studies investigated the source of these developmental changes by assessing children and adult’s abilities to form new semantic links from language input rich in direct and shared co-occurrence regularities. These studies revealed that abilities to form semantic links based on direct co-occurrence emerge in young children. With age, these abilities are increasingly supplemented by abilities to form semantic links based on shared co-occurrence.

Together, these studies provide evidence that co-occurrence regularities in language do contribute to the development of semantic organization. However, the mere accumulation of exposure to co-occurrence regularities is not sufficient. Instead, human learners also need to develop abilities to form semantic links from these regularities. These developing abilities may in turn govern how co-occurrence regularities in language shape the development of semantic organization.

Authors

• Layla Unger
  Presenting Author

• Olivera Savic, Ohio State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Vladimir Sloutsky, Ohio State University
  Non-Presenting Author